always downhill

the title refers to a hair-brained idea i came u with one the way to work, but having been at work for 8+ hours, i come to realize that it very much pertains to site.

first off, my hair-brained idea. on the way to work today, i realized how amazingly flat the road is on N.H. 5, part of the grand Golden Quadrilateral. it could be better if it was downhill, but that makes it uphill on the return trip, that is one of the things we have to deal with in a one-way time-directional universe. my idea is based on a video game i'd seen several years back at Dave & Buster's. it is a putting game, where you have a putter and a ball and the hole is maybe 10 feet in front of you. once you make the putt, actuators under the "turf" rise and fall thus creating a new "green" with new characteristics. so i'm thinking (envision I, Robot and Minority Report-style) infrastructure designers implement durable-yet-flexible roadway materials with actuators underneath, similar to the putting game. you will have a GPS+ transponder on your bicycle, skateboard, vehicle, whatever at the front and back that will hold various information about your vehicle, but the most important data in this scenario is wheelbase, distance from transponder to wheel centerline, and footprint of the vehicle to determine width. you can then tell the transponder how fast you want to go, and it will communicate to the road below you. the road will rise up behind you putting you always on a slight downhill slope to get where you want to go. the wave will only be as wide as your vehicle so others can pass you at any rate they wish. if you are on a bicycle, your wave will be 3-4 inches wide since you only need a narrow wave to push you. if you swerve or turn, the wave will follow along behind you, pushing you along because it will be tracking you via your GPS signal and will be able to tell if you are differing your path. so you can go to school, DOWNHILL both ways due to your own personal high-wave.

so, enough of that lunacy. onsite, we are heading downhill as usual. well, i guess downhill might be good because that would mean you are speeding to the finish, do in that sense, we are not going downhill. we are going downhill in the office meeting line-chart sense with Time on the X-axis and Progress on the Y-axis. the customer was told to fix some steam leaks. this is dangerous stuff. you can't see high-pressure/high-temperature steam. if you walk through this stuff, you'd be lucky to be alive long enough to see your lower body separated from your upper body and you might have time to notice the burnt meat smell emanating from the body-wide slice cauterized by the temperature of the steam. luckily, there were no personnel injuries, though. needless to say, but i did, because that is what you do with that phrase, they didn't fix the leaks, and this steam was just pouring onto the steam turbine turning gear (used to keep the bow out of the rotor and get it up to speed). the steam turbine is a rival company but on this site, we all gotta stick together. they came to our office and told us it was fukked. turning gear had been super boiled or something and it's a minimum of like 3 weeks to get another one. until they get one, we are SEVERELY limited to what we can do. excellent. yea! for following directions.

oh yeah, and the villagers are taking our customer to court for being so loud with the steam blows. i might have to apply for residency.